→ Can objective reporting do harm? "Nonsense!" – one could argue. "Neutral journalism aims at avoiding bias by giving equal coverage to both sides involved in an issue." The approach, known as "both-sides" reporting, is a golden standard of quality mass media. But why do researchers describe it with a less glamorous term – bothsidesism or even "false balance?" Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If media use the "both-sides" principle while disregarding context, it can actually do more harm than good.
On the morning of June 6, 2022, Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant's dam across the Dnipro River, sparking an enormous humanitarian and environmental disaster across southern Ukraine. The Dam has been under Russian occupation since February 24, 2022 – the very first day of the full-scale invasion. In the hands of the regime that owes its power to the residential building bombing in 1999, an infrastructure object like a massive dam is a ticking time bomb. In autumn 2022, Ukrainian officials warned that Russians mined it. When the world anticipated the Ukrainian counter-offensive, Kremlin played its trump card to prevent Ukrainian forces from fighting back in the Southern direction by turning the Kherson region into a swamp.
For anyone in Ukraine, it was evident that Russians committed another war crime – the next in a row of attacks following Bucha, Mariupol, Olenivka, and shellings of power plants. They turned the Dam into a weapon of mass destruction, flooding hundreds of villages, threatening water supplies, ruining the future of local farmers, and provoking the next disaster. Today, the Kakhovka dam collapse endangers the security of the Zaporizhya nuclear plant – the largest in Europe and still captured by Russians.
→ → How did Western media react to the catastrophe? With an unexpected yet apparent seizure of bothsidesism. The Dam collapse flooded major newspapers with titles that smeared responsibility for the disaster between Russia and Ukraine. Instead of putting two and two together, the media played the neutrality game. They quoted the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who blamed Ukraine for attacking the Dam. In the sixteenth month of the full-scale war raging in Ukraine, a blind insistence on "both-sides" reporting invalidated the victim's voice, equating it with the aggressor's. The saddest thing is that Peskov is dubbed as "The mouth of Putin" – the man, the International Criminal Court, has issued an arrest warrant for.
Big media reported as if the news was circulating in a vacuum. Their impartiality sounded even more absurd, knowing there were warning signs of Russians being up to something. In May, the water level in the Kakhovka reservoir reached its highest recorded level. It appeared that water had started to flow over the top of the dam due to Russia keeping too many gates closed. While the Western media confused not seeing everything in black and white with short-sightedness, Russian propagandists triumphed over their impunity for war crimes in Ukraine.
→ → → Freedom of speech is the apple of Western society's eye. It's equally valuable and vulnerable. Hacking it is as easy as cooking an omelet. As it turned out, you need only two ingredients: instead of eggs and milk – compulsive lies and "two-sides" reporting.
A belief that news should present a range of views within each story is a beautiful idea. In theory, it can beat bias. But it works only in the land of fairies and ponies. The approach fails when one side's core communication strategy is telling lies in the face of evidence.
In Ukrainian, there's an idiom "написано як чорним по білому" – "written in black on white" – meaning "perfectly clear." White is the lightest color, while black is the darkest. Texts in media have historically been printed in black on white to make them easier to read by providing the highest degree of contrast. However, if life is "not black or white, but shades of grey," so you need to quote a war criminal, writing in black on white is too "one-side-ist," isn't it?
I switched the font color of the titles the world saw in the aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam collapse from black to grey. I also aligned the words on both canvas margins to make them look as balanced and impartial as "both sides" reporting. A message must match its form, and that's what neutrality looks like.
